If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as nail

 Episode 4 saw the downfall of Melissa Cohen, she was bottom of my list the week before so I have got one thing right at least!

Today’s Apprentice topic is Assertiveness… it is interesting to see ‘Assertiveness’ in action during the Apprentice, and it can give some great observed behaviours. I’ll look at passive, aggressive, assertive, and the mixture of these…

We are already a quarter of the way through this series of The Apprentice, four down, twelve remain. So this week’s blog looks at who’s hot, and who’s not!! I’d love to know whether you agree or not…

Stella
Stella has got to be odds-on favourite, as she is the only unbeaten apprentice, has lead effectively as a PM and seems to be a good all-rounder. Stella seems to come with less bravado than most of the others and communicates her ideas clearly and effectively. The one to watch

Christopher

Episode one of the Apprentice is always a whirlwind, 16 new faces, lots jostling for position and the ever cringe worthy talking heads... Shibby’s quote ‘my first word wasn’t mummy, it was money’ will go down in Apprentice history. Episode two can often see the candidates settle, and we start to see more of the candidates. This week’s task was a product design and marketing exercise, another common Apprentice task, on this occasion the candidates were asked to design and market a new beach product, to three prospective customers

The long awaited return of The Apprentice introduced us to 16 new candidates, and the same formulaic approach, lots of short video bites of highly strung, uber-confident apprentices followed by chaos, arguments and eventual failure. The comment such as ‘everything I touch turns to sold’ within in the first minute suggested this series won’t let us down.

Love it, or hate it... The Apprentice is back on our screens! It will, I'm sure, make for compelling television again as Lord Alan Sugar fires, and for one individual hires, future business masterminds. Now the show and it's contestants are subject to heavy editing, but I'll be blogging each week casting opinion, analysing some 'lessons' to be learnt, and maybe drawing parallels to the 'real world'.